Remembering Terence McKenna (4)

I'm standing in the kitchen of his ethnobotanical preserve in Hawaii, watching Terence get another batch of Ayahuasca ready to brew. 

"Why don't you get your friend at Whole Earth to help do something about the plants?" 

I knew what he was talking about -- it was why he had an ethnobotanical preserve, and occupied a lot of our conversation as he showed me around the grounds the day before the night of my Ayahuasca experience. When he showed a plant, he talked about its pharmaceutical use (not all the plants were psychoactive -- many were medicinal)...and the threats to its environment and the people who know the most about how to use it. And the moment he said that, he it was as if he had held up a large lens and tuned my inchoate visions of the night before into a tight focus: "We have helped you. Now we need your help." was what the giant vegetable transmitter I saw outlined against the stars was transmitting into my brain. I have no objective way to prove or even show how Terence's question snapped the incomprehensible into a simple message. I just knew. 

This kind of knowing that is so deeply felt that it is also a way of being, was labeled "noetic" by William James. Edgar Mitchell, one of the Apollo astronauts, had a psychedelic experience when doing an extravehicular activity. He was so profoundly moved that he retired and founded the Institute of Noetic Sciences. I was their staff writer in the early 1980s. Mitchell told me a story about an air show in London that was being attended by a Soviet cosmonaut. The press thought it would be a good idea to put them both into the twin seats in the cockpit of a jet fighter. When they were seated and nobody else could hear them, Mitchell said that the first thing the cosmonaut said to him was "did you see God up there, too?"

I was attracted to the Institute of Noetic Sciences because of my interest in pursuing research about consciousness, and because the Director, Willis Harman, had written a book that influenced me, An Incomplete Guide to the future. Harman had been a professor of electrical engineering at Stanford in the 1950s, until one of his friends from his small home town, the legendary Al Hubbard, showed up with an experimental drug he said he had obtained from the CIA: LSD. Willis, by his account, said he ascended to the ceiling, where he observed his body on the couch. I've never known anyone as convinced as Willis that he was not his body. I ended up co-authoring with Willis our 1984 book, Higher Creativity: Liberating the Unconscious for Breakthrough Insights. 

"Would you be interested in co-editing an issue of Whole Earth Review?" was my reply to Terence's question." 

"Definitely."

I proposed the idea to Kevin Kelly, who instantly supported it. Terence and I decided to include material about plants as teachers and material about the impending loss of plant  habitat and knowledge about plant uses. In practical terms, Terence connected me with his friend Rob Montgomery. Rob had a small farm where he propagated and sold (legally) plants of ethnobotanical interest. I had a greenhouse. Banisteriopsis turned out to not like Northern California winters in an unheated greenhouse. But I was intrigued by Rob's operation. He went on expeditions to the Amazon and elsewhere, collected seeds and cuttings, and went through the paperwork necessary to legally expert them. Then he propagated them on his farm and sold plant starts through his catalog. He also had a growing network of other farmers and other explorers -- the fieldworkers would export endangered plants and the farmers would propagate and distribute them. We started the Botanical Preservation Corps to network the fieldworkers and the growers. Over twenty years later, a version still exists. 

Ours was the Fall, 1989 edition. WER went out of business in 1995. Someone I don't know bought the compilation rights and is selling a digital version online for a couple bucks. Someone else I don't know put a scan of one of my articles, Ethnobotany: the Search for Vanishing Knowledge, online. Maybe there are other articles online.

Not long after our co-edited magazine was published, the editor of Whole Earth Review, Kevin Kelly, asked me if I would guest-edit the quarterly magazine for a year, while he worked on a book. Kevin never returned and I ended up spending 4 years at the ramshackle office in Sausalito, one of the most satisfying enterprises of my life in publishing. I figured that I had been recruited by the plants, drafted into service, so when we put together the Millennium Whole Earth Catalog in 1994 (again, now available from someone I don't know), I insisted on reserving four two-page spreads for plant teachers. This was the cause of much conflict. The great genius of the original Whole Earth catalog, was that Stewart Brand found people who were not only experts in disparate fields -- from land use to childbirth to alternative energy technology -- but the centers of their own networks. Brand was what Fred Turner calls a "network entrepreneur." Each section editor puts out a call and receives an incoming flood of suggestions. The editor selects the best, within her own rubric for the catalog or the magazine issue. Then the executive editor balances the different streams of information from the disparate communities, and puts together the final mix. The ecosystems people and the community people and the energy people were always on my case about wanting one or two of the four spreads I had extravagantly allocated to plant teachers. But I stood my ground.

One more installment -- the night I followed Terence's directions and got a good whupping from a plant teacher. I stayed away from all psychedelics for more than twenty years.

back to part 3 

final installment: Part 5